Wrought of Iron and Silk, Book One [2014 Watty Award Winner]

Chapter 26 - The Arrow

Chapter 26 – The Arrow

It was as if the scales were falling from his eyes. Loki had experienced the sensations of a blind man who had suddenly been given back his sight. This desire to rule the realm, which had been so dazzling a moment before, at once grew dim. The candles in their golden candle-sticks paled like stars before the dawn and a thickening darkness filled Sigyn's bedchamber and his soul.

The day had come. He knew it. It hadn't been arrogance to believe that he would withstand Rilien's threats; he'd experienced pain in all of its forms, had endured horrors many times over and he would endure the battlefield, too. Instead, it was Cecilia; knowing that when his own strength waned, he would have her to draw from. When he would be stripped of everything but agony, he would have her rage to cling to, her calm, her compassion, and her humor. She had been an endless well of determination and strength. With that, Loki would endure forever.

And now, there was only one practical move left. The strategy was simple: to drive a wedge between the realms of Vanaheim and Alfheim in the hopes of causing a rift deep enough to make any union between its rulers a temporary impossibility, and forestalling the matter concerning Asgard as well.

Facing the Alfheim also meant facing the reality of his realm now slowly escaping his grasp. Loki questioned himself: had the burden of being King become heavier than he himself could carry?

More importantly, would Njord and Freyr allow themselves to feel, at least for a moment at the brink of war, that the rightful King of Asgard was capable of redemption?

And would that notion be enough for the sorcerer to consider not lifting his incantation on Odin, so that Loki could destroy the line for Asgard's throne?

A moment later, the door creaked open, and Loki raised his eyes. Through his dark lashes, he caught a glimpse of Sigyn, tall with the figure and bearing of a goddess, entering the room and closing the door quietly behind her.

The greatest painters who have pursued ideal beauty across half the realms, and brought it back in divine portraits would not even approach her incredible beauty. No poet's verses or painters palette could give conception of it. Her blonde hair with russet lights, parted at the crown of her head, streaming down over her temples like waves of red gold, so that one had the impression of a queen wearing a diadem. Her forehead was broad and tranquil, with a transparent blue-whiteness of complexion; it stretched above eyebrows that were surprisingly dark brown, a singularity that added still more to the startling effect of her vivid sea-green eyes, intolerably bright.

What eyes those were! He once thought in admiration. They decided a man's destiny in a single flash. They had life, a clear and shining depth, and a keen and glistening brilliance that he had never seen before: shafts of light sped from them, as distinct to him as flights of arrows striking toward his heart.

Loki watched her from the shadows as she glided toward the balcony, her nose pointed upward with high pride and delicacy of cut which betrayed aristocratic blood. The skin of her half-bared shoulders glowed in the moonlight, flowing with light like white agates, while loop after loop of fat, milky pearls crowded down upon her breast. From time to time, she tossed her head with the slow, rippling movement of a serpent or a peacock displaying itself, and a light tremor passed through the transparent lacework of her gown.

All those details would still be as vivid to him in years to come. Loki's mind was acutely disturbed, yet not a single thing would escape him. Not that night. He seized upon every particularity with an astonishing clarity of perception: the finest nuance of color, the tiny dark point at the tip of her chin, the imperceptible peach-down on the line of her lip and the trembling shadow of eyelashes upon her cheeks.